Objects Of Our Desire

Acquiring and Using Things Look around. What do you see? Lamps, tables, chairs, flower vases, paintings, pillows, newspapers, magazines, books? Or, if you happen to be in your kitchen, perhaps your eyes move from the refrigerator to the stove and from the microwave to the dishwasher and finally to the pots and pans in the sink. If you aren't at home but at a bus stop or an airport, you can hardly avoid noticing the large number of things that areor, shall we say, have becomepart of our lives and inhabit all the nooks and crannies of our existence. Things play an important role in how we navigate the world, communicate with one another, connect with our pasts, and express our desires. The emotional significance of physical objects is unmistakably evident all around us. You don't believe me? Notice the inviting contours of that sofa, the glint of a knife's edge, the sparkle of a diamond ring. Feel the softness of the pashmina around that woman's milky shoulders. Look at the majesty of a large jet plane. Take in the somberness of a gravestone. Put on an old pair of shoes. Clutch a warm mug of freshly brewed coffee. Sit on a rocking chair. Feel the sumptuous leather seats of a new car. We are surrounded by things. We are involved with them, indebted to them. We speak to things and things speak to us. To say that we are interdependent is banal. Let us be courageous. Let us admit it: we are lovers. And, like lovers, we are inseparable, even though we are often unable to express our love of things in words. Here poets come to our rescue. In his poem "Ode to Things," the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda openly voices his attachment to and his delight in the emotional gifts of the material world: I pause in houses, streets and elevators, touching things, identifying objects that I secretly covet; this one because it rings, that one because it's as soft as the softness of a woman's hip, that one there for its deep-sea color, and that one for its velvet feel. Even in less joyous forms, things form an integral part of our lives. We constantly discover, or as Freud would have it, rediscover them. Things affect our emotions and impact upon our thoughts. The arrival of a dozen roses from a lover or a letter from a grandchild makes our day. And we express our emotions, or innermost selves, with their help. Welling with love, we offer gifts, tokens of our affection. Feeling sad, we may reach for an old photo album that offers us friendly faces and memories of good times. Bitter and enraged, we give vent to our suppressed emotions by reading a book about a serial killer and vicariously identifying with his cruel acts. Such "conversation" between us and things is of course affected by our cultural heritage, by our gender, by our knowing and unknowing emulation of (or rebellion against) our parents, by our economic status, and by the value we place on material acquisitions, but it is universal. As such, we must first ask ourselves a truly basic question: Why do we need things? Things satisfy all sorts of physical and emotional needs in us. To begin with, they offer us "instrumental" help. We enlist their prowess to accomplish the tasks of daily living. We use cars, planes, trains, and boats for travel; clocks and watches for knowing time; knives to cut; spoons to feed ourselves with; chairs to sit upon; and so on. Actually, if we are honest and humble, we will acknowledge that our very survival depends upon things. As naked apes, which is what the ethologist Desmond Morris called human beings, we are hardly capable of surviving the harshness of nature alone. Inanimate objects come to our aid and save our lives. We need enclosed spacesmade of "things"to live, clothes to cover our vulnerable furless skin, artificial meaAkhtar, Salman is the author of 'Objects Of Our Desire ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400054442 and ISBN 1400054443.